1. Field of the Invention
The Application is in the field of computing systems and more specifically in the field of provisioning computing devices.
2. Related Art
Currently, applications require specific environments in which to execute. For example, applications are usually constructed with a specific operating system environment in mind, and migrating to a different operating system environment requires a different version of the application. In addition to operating system environments, there are also specific hardware requirements associated with applications. At the base level, an application compiled for use on a specific instruction set architecture (ISA) will be unable to execute on a machine with a different ISA.
Commonly used routines are frequently encapsulated in libraries configured to be accessed by applications. These libraries are generally shared among many different applications, allowing the software developer to leverage common functionality and reduce the application's file size. This approach is advantageous when a number of different applications make use of the same commonly used routines. Libraries that an application uses, but are not included with the distribution of the application, need to be present in the application's executing environment to execute the application as intended.
It is common practice to provide a wide variety of libraries and/or individual helper routines in an operating environment in order to support a wide variety of applications. Together these supporting elements comprise a general runtime environment that provides software services for processes or programs while a computer is running. The general runtime environment may further include an operating system, an associated kernel, and software that runs beneath the operating system, such as hardware device drivers.
A general runtime environment may include many components that are not required by those applications that are actually executed. This may be a disadvantage in circumstances that include limits on available memory, storage or other resources consumed by the unused components, when the extra components conflict with each other or in attempting to reduce the attack footprint.
In some instances a general runtime environment is contained within a virtual machine environment. A virtual machine environment is an environment that appears from the point of view of a software application within the virtual machine environment to be an independent hardware device. However, more than one virtual machine environment may be placed on a single hardware device. Each virtual machine environment may have different characteristics. This allows the single hardware device to support multiple applications or multiple copies of the same application each within its own isolated virtual machine environment.
One approach to overcoming the limitations of general runtime environments is to generate an application specific runtime environment for execution of an application, and executing the application within this application specific runtime environment. An application specific runtime environment includes software functionality required for executing a specific application. For example, the application specific runtime environment may include an executable application, an operating system, libraries, hardware drivers, configuration files, data and any other software functionality required to execute the application. Generally, the application specific runtime environment includes a reduced or minimum set of resources and may not include resources that are not required by the specific application.
The application specific runtime environment is typically a subset of a general runtime environment. As such, the application specific runtime environment is a reduced environment that requires fewer resources than a general runtime environment. For example, an application specific runtime environment may require less memory during application execution and/or less storage. The application specific runtime environment for a particular application is defined by an application environment specification. An application environment specification may be used to create an application specific runtime environment on-demand in response to a request to execute the related application. For example, an application environment specification may be used to select files from a resource repository configured to store software resources. These software resources may include, for example, software libraries, files, drivers, and configuration information.
An application environment specification may be referred to as an Application Blueprint™ and an application specific runtime environment may be referred to as a Dynamic Application Bundle™ (DAB™). Further details of application specific runtime environments, application environment specifications, and repositories are found in the patent applications cited above and incorporated herein by reference.